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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Ten principles/points for critiquing psychotherapy research

Most of the psychotherapy researchers focus
exclusively on various clinical interventions but they fail to acknowledge
psychotherapists who utilize their research findings. In most cases, these
researchers do not find the relevance of the experiences, skills and
personality of therapists. This essay describes some of the features that psychotherapyresearchers should know in order to
ensure that the various treatment groups are accorded the much needed interventions.

One of the critical issues affecting
psychotherapy research is the lack of proper supervision and training. This is
caused by the absence of a research literature body that can compare the
appropriateness of the methods used in training and supervision. Most of the
training models used in psychotherapy research are traditional in nature. In
addition, majority of the supervisors normally use their personal experiences
to supervise psychotherapy research. It is also pertinent to note that training
programs do not concentrate much on the topic under supervision. Piper (2004)
argues that in order to come up with a valid psychotherapy research, there is
need to use a simple and appropriate approach that is capable of addressing all
the implications associated with psychotherapy research. Specifically, a
straightforward approach should be adopted since it is capable of providing a
therapy list with more efficacy evidence.

Another critique to psychotherapy research is
that these researchers aim at maximizing the treatment power. This implies that
efforts are only put in place to countercheck the factors that affect
therapists. The latter is executed by developing treatment manuals that can be
used collectively on patients from a specific diagnostic group. It is evident
that this type of research approach is not capable of providing the necessary
attention especially on the curative roles that are linked to functions of therapists
largely due to the fact that it appears to be independent of the available treatment
procedures and models.

Psychotherapy research can also be assessed
in terms of the clinical trials that aim at controlling the effects of therapy.
This practice is desired mainly because it may reach a point where all
therapists in a trial are able to operate at equal levels. This ensures that
therapist effects are taken as error sources rather than treating them like
variance sources.

Psychotherapy research mainly involves brief
therapies and fails to recognize the need for long-term therapies. The research
reports are written tentatively and contain major limitations that do not provide
any form of inspirational confidence to the clinicians.

Psychotherapy research can also be criticized
in terms of the research element itself which seems to be driven more by
political reasons and funding patterns other than being based on the true promise
of improving psychotherapy.

The developers of models used in conducting
psychotherapy research are more interested in showing the relevance of their
models. This might be attributed to the pressure subjected to the developers especially
when they are expected to add credibility to the treatment approaches.

Psychotherapy research is also criticized
from the perspective of relevance of scientific measures that may not be
available. These researchers also focus more on the therapeutic techniques and
fail to recognize the value of relationships between clients and therapist.
Lastly, researchers usually ignore some of the key variables that help in making
sure that the psychotherapy study is more manageable. The studies that need to
be incorporated in psychotherapy complexities are also rarely done.